Sohn Hong Kong 2026: Toroa Management’s Silas Xu Argues This Dominant Dental Company Is A 3x Opportunity

Silas Xu, Founder and CIO of Toroa Management, a Hong Kong-based fundamental equity hedge fund focused on Japan, Korea, Greater China, and other APAC markets spoke at the 2026 Sohn Hong Kong Conference on May 20th 2026. Xu’s pitch was built around a single company in a single industry – clear dental aligners – but his focus was broader focusing on the question of which Chinese companies actually create lasting value for shareholders?

Over the past 14 years, Xu has deployed capital across a diverse range of companies and sectors in the Asia-Pacific public markets. Prior to his career in the public markets, Silas was a member of Blackstone’s private equity team for five years in the U.S. and Asia. He founded Toroa Management in 2021; the fund began trading with roughly US$200 million in assets. Xu is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

The Formula for Success in China

Xu opened not with a stock ticker but with a question: what is the formula for success in China? He pointed to three companies as examples. BYD delivered a 7x return since 2019, reaching a market cap of roughly $130 billion. Wuxi AppTec returned 5x over the same period to a market cap near $50 billion. And Innolight, the optical interconnect company Xu included as the obligatory AI name, returned 40x, reaching approximately $140 billion in market cap. Xu chose 2019 deliberately, noting that these returns were achieved after investors absorbed the full round-trip of the down years. What these companies share, he argued, is China’s engineer dividend: five million STEM graduates per year producing faster innovation, better customer service, and structural global share gain.

But Xu quickly identified the problem with this pattern. Many Chinese companies take global market share and dominate their industries yet fail to consistently create shareholder value. The value flows to the customer rather than to the equity owner. Who wins is ultimately a function of pricing power, and pricing power is a function of competitive dynamics. For a shareholder to benefit as a company takes share, that company must be able to hold its prices against competition.